NEWS
ANALYSIS
In Calling Elections in France, Macron Makes a
Huge Gamble
The president has challenged voters to test the
sincerity of their support for the far right in European elections. Were the
French letting off steam, or did they really mean it?
Roger Cohen
By Roger
Cohen
Reporting
from Paris
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/10/world/europe/france-macron-elections-analysis.html
June 10,
2024
Updated
10:52 a.m. ET
On the face
of it, there is little logic in calling an election from a position of great
weakness. But that is what President Emmanuel Macron has done by calling a snap
parliamentary election in France on the back of a humiliation by the far right.
After the
National Rally of Marine Le Pen and her popular protégé Jordan Bardella handed
him a crushing defeat on Sunday in elections for the European Parliament, Mr.
Macron might have done nothing, reshuffled his government, or simply altered
course through stricter controls on immigration and by renouncing contested
plans to tighten rules on unemployment benefits.
Instead,
Mr. Macron, who became president at 39 in 2017 by being a risk taker, chose to
gamble that France, having voted one way on Sunday, will vote another in a few
weeks.
“I am
astonished, like almost everyone else,” said Alain Duhamel, the prominent
author of “Emmanuel the Bold,” a book about Mr. Macron. “It’s not madness, it’s
not despair, but it is a huge risk from an impetuous man who prefers taking the
initiative to being subjected to events.”
Shock
coursed through France on Monday. The stock market plunged. Anne Hidalgo, the
mayor of Paris, a city that will host the Olympic Games in just over six weeks,
said she was “stunned” by an “unsettling” decision. “A thunderbolt,” thundered
Le Parisien, a daily newspaper, across its front page.
For Le
Monde, it was “a jump in the void.” Raphaël Glucksmann, who guided the revived
center-left socialists to third place among French parties in the European
vote, accused Mr. Macron of “a dangerous game.”
France is
always a mystery, its perennial discontent and restiveness at odds with its
prosperity and beauty, but this was a surprise of unusual proportions. Mr.
Macron, after a stinging defeat in which the National Rally won 31.37 percent
of the vote to 14.6 percent for the coalition led by his Renaissance party, has
in effect called his country’s bluff, asking if its apparent readiness for the
extreme right in power is real or a mere letting-off of steam.
The risk is
that about a month from now Mr. Macron would have to govern with Mr. Bardella,
28, who represents everything he abhors, as his prime minister. If the
nationalist, anti-immigrant National Rally wins an absolute majority in the
577-member National Assembly, an unlikely scenario, or merely emerges as by far
the strongest party, which is more plausible, Mr. Macron may be obliged to
swallow hard and do that.
Ms. Le Pen,
with her eye on winning the presidency in 2027, would almost certainly defer to
Mr. Bardella, who led the party’s European election campaign, for the post of
prime minister.
France
would then be confronted with the consecration through high political office of
the extreme right, an idea held unthinkable ever since the Vichy government
ruled France in collaboration with the Nazis between 1940 and 1944.
Why play
with fire in this way? “It’s not the same election, not the same form of
ballot, and not the same stakes,” said Jean-Philippe Derosier, a professor of
public law at the University of Lille. “Macron apparently feels it’s the least
bad choice to have a possible National Rally prime minister under his control,
rather than a Le Pen victory in 2027.”
In other
words, Mr. Macron, who is term limited and will leave office in 2027, may be
flirting with the notion that three years in office for the National Rally —
turning it from a party of protest to a party with the onerous responsibilities
of government — would stall its inexorable rise.
It is one
thing to rail from the margins, quite another to run a heavily indebted and
polarized country so angry over the level of immigration, crime and living
costs that many French people seem driven by a sentiment that “enough is
enough.”
As in other
Western societies, including the United States, a widespread feeling of
alienation, even invisibility, among people outside the wired cities of the
knowledge economy has led to a broad feeling that the prevailing system needs
blowing up.
Ms. Le Pen
on Sunday announced the end of “the painful globalist parenthesis that has made
so many people suffer in the world.” Given that mainstream pro-European parties
won about 60 percent of the vote in the European Parliament election, despite
the far-right surge, that appeared to be a bold prediction.
A
“cohabitation,” as the French call it, between a president from one party and a
prime minister from another, is not unknown — most recently, Jacques Chirac, a
center-right Gaullist, governed with a Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin,
between 1997 and 2002. France survived and Mr. Chirac was re-elected.
But never
before has there been such an ideological gulf, going to the very conception of
French values and the core importance of the European Union for the continent’s
liberty, as there would be between Mr. Macron and a National Rally prime
minister.
Roger Cohen
is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has
reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza,
in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a
correspondent, foreign editor and columnist. More about
Roger Cohen
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